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Galleporto Bavicarius Directory 17
Page 10
The effects of the battle of Bouvines were not confined to France nor to the war then going on. The results in German history--the fall of Otto IV, the triumph of Frederick II--we have no occasion to trace. In English history its least important result was that John was obliged to make peace with Philip. The treaty was dated on September 18. A truce was agreed upon to last for five years from the following Easter, everything to remain in the meantime practically as it was left at the close of the war. This might be a virtual recognition by John of the conquests which Philip had made, but for him it was a much more serious matter that the ruin of his schemes left him alone, unsupported by the glamour of a brilliant combination of allies, without prestige, overwhelmed with defeat, to face the baronial opposition which in the past few years had been growing so rapidly in strength, in intelligent perception of the wrongs that had been suffered, and in the knowledge of its own power.
When I recall the time when the only mode of travel was by stage-coach, boat, or private carriage--when the journey from Boston to St. Louis demanded a week longer in time than we now spend in going from Boston to Egypt--when no telegraph existed--when letter postage was twenty-five cents and the postal service extremely primitive--when no house was comfortably warmed and women carried foot-stoves to unheated churches--when candles and oil lamps were the only means of "lighting up," and we went about the streets at night with dim lanterns--when women spun and wove and sewed with their hands only, and all they accomplished was done at the hardest--when in our country a young girl might almost as reasonably attempt to reach the moon as to become an artist--remembering all this it seems as if an army of magicians must incessantly have waved their wands above us, and that human brains and hands could not have invented and put in operation the innumerable changes in our daily life during the last half-century.
Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the "Odyssey," and of Jane Austen--the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life consist--their own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life till a hundred years or so after he was dead and buried? His physical life was but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as regards that life which every age and country has recognised as higher and truer than the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere perhaps more plainly than in the case of great teachers, who often in the lives of their pupils produce an effect that reaches far beyond anything produced while their single lives were yet unsupplemented by those other lives into which they infused their own.
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